ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the relationship between the distribution of economic resources, not necessarily exclusively but certainly primarily through coins, within Athens in the later Archaic and Classical Age, and the cohesion this brought to the demos as a socio-economic-political group laid the foundations for the democracy. Coinage functioned within fifth-century Athens to assist this cohesion and therefore was a fundamental aspect of Athenian democracy. Scholars such as Sara Forsdyke have doubted almost certainly correctly that the Megarians enjoyed any kind of democracy this early in Greek history, but Plutarch's story reflects an elite ideology that recalled the relationship between political breadth and resource distribution and the problems this created in their perhaps not so distant past. Robin Osborne noted that coinage acted to incorporate country aristocrats into the life of the state as liturgists and distributors and to tie them to the state in their need to gather coins for that purpose.
